Golden Trousers

Yesterday, Bear Creek had a rather exciting milestone. For the first time, four of us got together during Lunch and Office Hours – rather on a whim, although one of the four and I have used that day of the rotation as a discussion period several times before – to talk about the Church's attitude towards homosexuality, mislabeling, hate crimes, and the future of LGBT issues in general. A tiny little underground GSA. We watched part of the video I took of the God Hearts Queers lecture I attended at Trinity Lutheran College last Thursday the 19^th, mocking my terrible, amateur filming skills and pausing the video every now and then to discuss things he said. It was exciting, to say the least. It had this air of ambitious independence about it; this whole process has felt that way. Talking back over our meeting on IM that night, one of the four that was there said that it feels like the “ball is rolling.” I responded that I'm still in awe that the ball exists. That's where we're at right now, but it's an exciting contrast to last year this time, when I was the only one I knew of that cared.

One of the conversations we had was about the way stereotypes create an unfair bias against men in regard to gender presentation. As a woman, I could walk into Home Depot in men's cargo shorts, men's flip flops, a men's T-shirt, my hair pulled back, and wearing no makeup, with a relatively emasculate gait and not only be identified as a woman, but it's unlikely that I would even be called some pejorative hate word or given weird looks. But if a man wears – as per our example – gold short shorts, even if he does nothing else that seems effeminate, he will likely be called gay and mocked. Even among our group, which is so hyper-sensitive to these issues, we all reacted with laughs. And not just because the shorts were gold... Let's face it, there's something we find funny and vaguely uncomfortable about a guy in short shorts. What is it in our social programming that makes it so much more ridiculous for men to wear effeminate clothes than it is for women to wear emasculate clothes? You might respond at first that it's more inappropriate for men... But really, what does it mean for something to be “inappropriate”? Bare female skin unquestionably poses the greater danger to social conservatives in terms of temptation potential. And if you think about it, men's legs aren't necessarily uglier than women's. But if they prettified their legs the same way women tend to... wouldn't people mockingly call them trannies?

Perhaps this gender bias is the work of feminists. Women aspired to be equal to men, and often confused that with a desire to be like men. During WWII, they replaced men in the workplace and often used manliness as a symbol of their newfound power. 

Perhaps it's the oposite: maybe it's exactly the later feminists' (think Girl Power in the 1990s - early 2000s) full embrace of femininity that argues that it, and not women, is what masculinity, and not men,  condemn in their sexism. Maybe "sexism" in an inappropriate term altogether; maybe it's genderism. Maybe femininity has been seen as weak and ornamental for so long that even slightly more effeminate men now suffer from a societal judgment affecting bias against that gender.

On a related note, perhaps it's because men's clothing tends to be more plain and practical. If you're going to default in any direction, practicality seems a more sensical direction to default in than fashion. But maybe that's just me. Regardless, chick fashion, tight clothing, and bright colors stands out more. Men's clothing is designed without the express intent of drawing eyes toward its wearers. That might cause social predators to target things like gold shorts more quickly and easily than khaki cargo pants.

In reality, all of these things probably played a part in the reason things ended up the way they are. The deeper and more relevant question is about the way that we, as self-proclaimed (and self-conscious) catalysts for social change in these matters, should try to think about it all ourselves. What does it help for us to be obnoxious about sexism and heteronormativism and insensitivity to gender diversity and all that if we don't challenge ourselves to think differently?

It's hard enough to train ourselves to think differently about gender when we've thought about it the same way our whole lives, but I believe there's a huge pre-established linguistic disadvantage in the process. Gendered pronouns are the obvious killer; people (myself included) get super annoyed by the clunkiness of the whole s/he or he and she or she and he business, and it gets all complicated because it looks like you're pushing some obnoxious feminist agenda if you put she first, but you're endorsing male privilege if you put he first... It's just kind of ridiculous. 

But there's more to the process than just that. There's a lot of LGBT culture that simply isn't covered by widespread, easy-to-use, easy-to-understand vocabulary. And it's so hard to understand something if there are no words to communicate what we're thinking. We speak out against stereotypes and say that labels negate and all that, but we can't understand things unless we label them. It's science. It's the dictionary. It's a child's first gurgly half-word noises. We put things in groups and associate them with each other in order to form categories and move through them. There's no way of getting around that. What happens when we have no comfortable word for metrosexual-y-men that have spunk and an attitude and have all the stereotypical gay flair..... but aren't gay? I often catch myself wanting to laugh and endearly call people things like "fabulously gay" when I'm watching YouTube videos or am around guy friends that are that way. But the word "gay" doesn't suit them, because their "gay"-ness - which is actually "metrosexual-y spunk" - has absolutely nothing to do with sexuality. That personality (or perhaps we can go so far as to say, that gender type), just tends to be associated with gay men.

How do we differentiate between "gay" the personality, "gay" the gender, and "gay" the sex? Because gender identity is such a fluid, intuitive, psychological thing, it could theoretically be possible for someone to feel completely cis-male and Kinsey-0 straight and yet be as "gay" (or "metrosexual-spunky") as anyone's ever been. But then it's also possible for people to use the label "gay" as descriptive of genderqueerness - just being super effeminate. And it's also possible for "straight-acting" cis/gendernormal gays to use it as the dictionary-definition reclaimed term for "homosexuality." How do we navigate the issue and the language at the same time while also making sure that we're sensitive to people in the practical world? It's complicated, and society has not made it easy for us to deal with it.

The first step is obviously self-awareness. After that, it might get subjective and complicated, but learning to be conscious of how we think and speak about these issues is a very clear place to start. Once we're able to recognize whatever problems arise from concepts of sex and gender, we've already eliminated 98% of the opportunity for stupid faux pas and bullying to happen. Almost all rude, insensitive things that are said and done about this seem to be rooted in ignorance and a lack of forethought. Eliminating these things doesn't happen simply by willing them away. They begin to fade with education, and education takes effort. Intentionality. Teachers. An understanding of the importance of the topic at hand. That does not yet exist where I am. And that is what I want to create.